Friedrich Paschen
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Louis Karl Heinrich Friedrich Paschen (January 22, 1865 - February 25, 1947), was a German physicist, known for his work on electrical discharges. He is also known for the Paschen series, a series of hydrogen spectral lines in the infrared region that he first observed in 1908. He established the now widely used Paschen curve in his article "Über die zum Funkenübergang in Luft, Wasserstoff and Kohlensäure bei verschiedenen Drücken erforderliche Potentialdifferenz".[1]
Paschen was born in Schwerin, Mecklenburg-Schwerin. From 1884 to 1888 he studied at the universities of Berlin and Strassburg, after which he became an assistant at the Academy of Münster. He became a professor at the Technical Academy of Hanover in 1893 and professor of physics at the University of Tübingen in 1901. He served as president of the Physikalisch-Technischen Reichsanstalt from 1924-33 and an honorary professor of the University of Berlin in 1925. He taught there until his death in Potsdam.